PVE all of the sudden get "not horrible"? For those of us that don't care much about or didn't enjoy the PVP, there doesn't seem to be much reason to get into Guild Wars... again.

At the core Guild War's PvE hasn't changed. You take a small team of players/henchmen through a series of quests and missions. But the things around it has changed.

Original: Henchmen sucked. You couldn't play solo past a certain point.Nightfall: Henchmen fight well. Heroes are even better. You can play the whole game solo. I am attempting to prove it now.

Original: Lots of filler quests most weren't rewarding. Give low xp/money and items you don't want.Nightfall: Filler quests give more money/xp and Quartermaster items. Quartmaster items are turned in for utility items that you can actually use.

Original: Skills and Elite Skills where a pain to get. Filling out you're skill set was a lot extra work.Nightfall: Skills are much to easier buy because of the above changes and because trainers have offer many more skils to train. Elites are easier to capture and easier find. With spoilers they are just like any other quest. And changing secondaries is much easier.

Original: The story was a complete mess, uninteresting, and cliched. Even worse than FF8 and Dungeon Seige.Nightfall: The story straight forward, original, mildly interesting. On par with Chrono Cross.

Original: Loot is boring.Nightfall: It's a little less boring with named items and insciptions.

The playerbase still sucks and the world is gamey. But the bottom-line for me is all the things that dragged down PvE are gone and all the fun core mechanics are still there.

Pretty much summed it up. I'm enjoying it almost despite myself. The PvE is still a bit bland (but pretty) but it's not a struggle anymore. The heroes aren't just good they're FUN; playing with the different skill sets and watching the AI play a minion master to perfection is a thing of beauty.

Taz, have you tried the hero based pvp at all? I've got just enough people coming back to the guild to set some of that up and am curious as to how it works.

I don't particularly like playing with broken characters. At the same time, I like playing with super fast characters - which tend to be broken due to DPS in online games. Like right now I'm deciding whether to go the munchkin total ninja badass route with Vaan in FFXII or having a true spellcaster with Ashe. Or go Ninja/Black&Arcane Magic hybrid with Penelo. These are serious decisions I have to make. I did however take off work to finish FFXII by saturday so I can get back to other games I'm loving like Devil Summoner, Scourge, some old PC stuff (kinda learning DotA), and various other games including God Hand.

I'm hoping Nightfall fixes PvE as much as op says. The box is still waiting for me at the store (a lot of boxes are, I'm keeping myself from being distracted - though I did break down and buy Children of Mana and Powerstone Collection this morning).

I don't particularly like playing with broken characters. At the same time, I like playing with super fast characters - which tend to be broken due to DPS in online games. Like right now I'm deciding whether to go the munchkin total ninja badass route with Vaan in FFXII or having a true spellcaster with Ashe. Or go Ninja/Black&Arcane Magic hybrid with Penelo. These are serious decisions I have to make. I did however take off work to finish FFXII by saturday so I can get back to other games I'm loving like Devil Summoner, Scourge, some old PC stuff (kinda learning DotA), and various other games including God Hand.

I'm hoping Nightfall fixes PvE as much as op says. The box is still waiting for me at the store (a lot of boxes are, I'm keeping myself from being distracted - though I did break down and buy Children of Mana and Powerstone Collection this morning).

Completely broken may be a bit of an overstatement. It's not as though you're invincible or anything. What you do have is an attack that you just tab around putting on everything that the AI is never going to be smart enough to deal with. Quick kills.

The pve's not perfect. There are still bland parts and mechanically there's not a ton of variance. But the missions are all pretty cool; for contrast I went back and got a new set of armor infused and even ten minutes in this old mission was pretty awful by comparison.

Assassins are glass tigers. Assassin chains can be tough. Some people can't adjust. They have to play like a warrior.

The henchies can take care of themselves now. That frees up the the assassin player to teleport into the enemy casters, and be reasonably assured the henchies won't die while you are taking of business.

If I don't want to buy Factions, can I still buy this and have an excellent game play experience? And furthermore, if I somehow get to level 20 and advance to the 'end game', is Factions going to be required for that?

I am very impressed with the description so far. Non-shitty henchmen is definitely enough to get me to play this game. The PvE would be 10x better (although still not great, but at least decent) if I wasn't forced to do it with other people.

> If I don't want to buy Factions, can I still buy this and have an excellent game play experience? Yes. Nightfall is completely stand-alone.

>And furthermore, if I somehow get to level 20 and advance to the 'end game', is Factions going to be required for that?You get to 20 early in the story-line. Development post-20 is lateral. Having Factions gives you a few more lateral options.

>I am very impressed with the description so far. Non-shitty henchmen is definitely enough to get me to play this game. The PvE would be 10x better (although still not great, but at least decent) if I wasn't forced to do it with other people.

I haven't played through Prophecies in a long while, but the Henchmen there should there should use the new AI too. You could test drive it there before you buy Nightfall.

It's a Nightfall mission... Grand Court of Sebelkeh. Actually ended up with a human group and two heroes. Nailed it pretty well. Prior to that, though, had about eight failures with just AI party members.

I'm saying that the new AI is pretty damned good and the new heroes rock faces but there are certain situations where even a bad human is preferable. A mission where you have to split forces is far better in the hands of a human. This mission was one of those cases.

The henchies/heroes can interrupt Orison of Healing and similar fast casting spells. That makes me envious. Friggin LPBs. :P Of course they don't have any sort of 'priority' on spell interrupting, they'll blow interrupts on fast casting/cheap spells and then watch the enemy cast Meteor Shower unhindered.

They aren't so smart about skill usage overall though, and a lot of builds are wasted on them. A Monk build with Word of Healing f'rex will just spam WoHl over and over and over, even if the target is above 50%; a barrage ranger will just spam barrage (even vs 1 mob) and neglect interrupts (I got around this by manually disabling barrage when I really need her to interrupt stuff), and getting them to use traps properly is a huge pita. They ARE pretty efficient though, overall, even if they seem to have a hardon for spamming elite skills. One of my guildies made a minion master out of the necro hero back on Tyria and he's a one-man wrecking ball. Can probably solo most of the stuff in a mission by his AI lonesome.

Also, have to put their rez or rez signet off autocast as well and use that stuff manually, or they end up wasting it / wasting 10 seconds of trying to rez in combat and letting someone die, then having the person they rezzed die immediately as well.

It's a Nightfall mission... Grand Court of Sebelkeh. Actually ended up with a human group and two heroes. Nailed it pretty well. Prior to that, though, had about eight failures with just AI party members.

It took me 10 trys to finally to beat to it solo. It was really clawing uphill since the henchies aren't lightbringers and I was forced to use my Monk Hero I hadn't leveled much. Thunderhead Keep wasn't that hard but it's so long, so many chances to make mistakes.

Beat the game last night with an actual (gasp!) group of people who were competent.

The story's not going to set the world on fire but it's all markedly better than the prior two. It also fleshes out the lore in a way that hasn't been there before.

Last boss would be appreciated by Schild (though I doubt he'll get there); it reminded me almost of an old SNES last fight in its execution. Very consoley, though not horribly challenging.

Overall, this was a good buy. Whether I have the easy time negotiating the game with my dervish that I did with my SS necro is up in the air but they've drawn me back into the game. And I still maintain that nobody does environments as well as the GW art team.

Personally, I think the perfect guild likes to GvG but doesn't care about winning.

Right, then it isn't so much about how much you play, just that you play. My perfect night of playing would be to just log on and find people willing to get a fight going. After each loss we'd talk about how to improve and do it again. No bitching, no whining, no stomping of feet, no drama...

Tried some stuff I hadn't bothered with before. Alliance Battles, which I assumed meant giant organized fights of guild alliances, are pretty cool. Just show up, jump into a group of 4 and go. You're dropped with 2 other 4-man groups against and equal number, fighting for the Luxon or Kurzick side depending on... well, your guild and you. Since there's automatic rezzing, it allows much looser builds than the random arenas. Minion masters are fun there. So is a minion master who brought along Verata's Aura.

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell. -Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

I'm actually picking Nightfall up this week. Probably Wed or Thurs. They were kind enough to hold a collector's edition for me until the winter drought.

Have they put clan stuff in for groups with islands yet? (like us)

Also, how long does it take to 20 a character now? (I ask because I'd like to make a straight Dervish).

Other questions? Sure, why not.

Has the hardware requirements gone up? Factions ran slower than the original one for me. Part of the reason I never got into the assassin. Also, and tell me straight here, does the economy still make no sense whatsoever? Oh, and is there any purpose in the game thus far?

Basically, while picking this up is inevitable, I still have other games to play - including ones I'm paying for (Phantasy Star Universe), but I remember enjoying leveling my necromancer/elementalist in the original game - though 10-20 of us were almost always on.

>Has the hardware requirements gone up? I upgraded my video card for EQ2, so I don't know, but its only a little bit if they did.

>Also, and tell me straight here, does the economy still make no sense whatsoever? It not a virtual world, economic simulation is not the goal.

>Oh, and is there any purpose in the game thus far?The purpose is to play through the story and fight against others online. Both aspects have been improved. What's purpose of any game?

>but I remember enjoying leveling my necromancer/elementalist in the original game - though 10-20 of us were almost always on.It was pretty great to able to group with people you like and being chat will playing.

>Anyway, yea, How cool is dervish and is this worth my time?I have played to 12 with Derv. The Derv is not nearly as brittle as the the Assassin and I thought it was fun to store up a bunch enchantments and dump them on group baddies. Many people really like the avatars because they make you a serious badass for 50 seconds.

Picked up Nightfall. Didn't get Much time to play around. PvE SEEMS better. We'll see. Even while skipping the first tutorial, this game holds your hand, a lot. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. Odds are, over the next month or so, I'll at the very least play the storyline.